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What Should I Consider Before Having an Important Conversation? Part 2postedMay 10, 2017

When a person holds in these exhausting emotions of stress, anxiety, or anger over extended periods of time, it depletes their emotional resources. When kept inside, it can wreak havoc on your body, everything from your skin, complexion, to your bones and heart. It takes a toll on your creative capabilities because when you feel these emotions, and keep them inside, the body has to deal with them. By moving these emotions from inside to outside through expressing them (by verbal or physical means), it brings incredible benefits, better than medication which comes with greater risks and side effects. Higher blood pressure, increased strain on your heart, higher risk of fighting in your relationships, increased likelihood to be continuously stressed, increased risk of injury, headache, decreased decision making ability, proportionately decreased creativity and productivity, and more. The benefits of expressing yourself are the reverse of all of those, plus it’s a big step toward what we actually want in life: feeling happiness, feeling fulfilled, and living with inner peace.

In addition to the many pieces about how and what you say, there is also a concept that to express yourself most effectively you need to be in tune with the listener’s needs. For example, there are three styles of learning in which people process what you are saying: Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic. In very brief terms, when expressing yourself to someone who is Visual you want to use actual visuals or words that conjure up an image in their mind. For example, if you want to let your teammate know how frustrated you are that they didn’t show up when you needed them most, you can say “I felt like I had a mountain of work, and you didn’t care, you were just standing at the bottom waving to me, as I .”If your partner is Auditory you could say to them, “From the sound of it, I think it would be a good idea. A Kinesthetic message could be, “I feel that,” or, “I get the feeling that you’re having a tough time grasping on this.”

What is one thing you can consider to help you get over the fear of rejection and empower yourself to have this difficult conversation?(Continued in Part 3)